Salesforce is a cloud computing company that offers various customer relationship management (CRM) products and social enterprise (e.g., social networking) solutions. Companies offering CRM services, such as Salesforce, can provide entities with an interface for case management and task management, as well as a system for automatically routing and escalating important events. The Salesforce platform also enables individual customers to track their own cases. In some instances, the Salesforce platform includes a social networking add-on application (also referred to as a “plug-in”) that allows the Salesforce platform to read conversations on social networking websites, analyze emails, chat messages, search engine queries, etc.
Force.com® and Heroku®, meanwhile, are development platforms that can be used by developers to build and run applications entirely in the cloud. For example, Force.com applications could be hosted on the architecture of the Salesforce platform and are typically built using Apex, which is a proprietary Java-like programming language. However, some hybrid applications utilize resources (e.g., data or processes) hosted by multiple platforms. For instance, an application supported by the Heroku may request resources from Force.com (or vice versa). It is often desirable to link to external services and external sources of data when developing hybrid applications for the Salesforce platform.